In the later 18th-century John Robert Cozens began to extend the expressive possibilities of the watercolor medium, conveying an emotional response to nature. His many views of Italy, generated from studies he made on his trip there between 1776 and 1779, were extremely influential for British landscape artists of the following generations. The balance of the composition and its measured recession into space refers to the classical compositional formulae of earlier artists Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, but Cozens’s composition retains little relationship to the technique of topographical drawing found in other works in this gallery. Cozens’s watercolor washes instead emphasize the lyrical quality of diffused light and the impression of atmosphere.

Between 1776 and 1779, Cozens accompanied Richard Payne Knight (1750-1824) antiquarian, connoisseur, and collector, on the Grand Tour through Switzerland to Rome. Cozens sketched continuously on the journey and throughout the next decade worked from these studies (subsequently part of the Knight collection) to produce distinctly styled watercolors, such as this one, primarily in blue grays contrasted with soft browns. There are at least nine compositions of Lake Nemi looking toward the Swiss town of Genzano, a popular subject.